In my last job we were working VERY hard to make a few Watts of 13 nm light- and even then it wasn't a coherent beam... What is so magical about 3nm?

Maybe you mean the _3rd harmonic_ from the laser at NIF? They triple the fundamental frequency of their laser so that it is in the UV before firing at their target... but the wavelength is still in the hundreds of nanometers

I have visited the NIF facility in lawrence Livermore Natl. Lab- it is a dizzying technological achievement- There is NO doubt that it will produce fusion, but it wont break even... Its not meant to.

ICF may work out- far weaker intensities than the laser I just posted about have created fusion- again no breakeven... In fact a tabletop laser created fusion by firing ultra short intense pulses at clusters of deuterium atoms... The electric field of the light (~780nm wavelength I believe) stripped the electrons fron the atoms in the cluster- leaving it positively charged- the atoms in the cluster exploded out of the cluster due to coulomb repulsion and some collided and fused... The intensity at the focus of this laser was over 3 orders of magnitude less than the one in the article I posted... so who knows- It may eventually work out...

(If you are interested in laser induced fusion, The 'tabletop' laser I mentioned can be found in papers by Ditmire)